Higher powered Pi 4 alternatives for Retropie

George Spiggott

@barbudreadmon So the big question is will it throttle for MAME/Soulcalibur? There was a whole thread about running Soulcalibur on the Pi4 a while back. It's almost there in terms of playability on a Pi4. I doubt you need that much more CPU power to get it to run well.

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/25148/soul-calibre

There's also stuff like this. I use one of these at work. It's about 8" square which is smaller than the monitor stand that sits on it. Obviously I've never run emulation on it but the one in the video has an Intel i5 7500t and UHD 630 so should be well capable of running any MAME ROMS.

dodonpachi

@george-spiggott I suspect you may be right about needing just a little more CPU, which is why in my first post I was looking for something closer to 3.0 ghz. Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu was absolutely unplayable on Pi 3B+ overclocked to 1.6 ghz, but it's almost there on Pi 4 overclocked to 2.1 ghz. That's a difference of 500 mhz.

Perhaps my understanding of computers is simplified, but I'm willing to guess I'd be successful around the 2.7 ghz mark.

George Spiggott

@dodonpachi Mhz will often be a poor guide to comparing capabilities of CPUs. What you're looking for on an X86 processor is the Single Thread Rating (STR) . The Intel i5 7500T has a rating of 1966 The Larkbox'S CPU has an STR of 1073. My NUC has an STR of 2249 and runs Soulcalibur perfectly. Can anyone with an older processor chime in?

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-7500T+%40+2.70GHz&id=2917

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+J4115+%40+1.80GHz&id=3679

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-8259U+%40+2.30GHz&id=3299

dodonpachi

@george-spiggott So it's possible to have a CPU with a lower clock speed in mhz than a Pi 4, but better MAME performance?

barbudreadmon

@dodonpachi said in Higher powered Pi 4 alternatives for Retropie:

@george-spiggott So it's possible to have a CPU with a lower clock speed in mhz than a Pi 4, but better MAME performance?

MAME has a few dynarecs running on x86, and iirc one of them is for the sh3 cpu used in cv1k games (there might be some shenanigans to enable it though), so in this specific case i would expect a 2Ghz x86 cpu would do much better than a pi4. There might be other cases were the situation will be reversed (losing a dynarec because you switched from arm to x86).

Folly

@dodonpachi said in Higher powered Pi 4 alternatives for Retropie:

But, there's certain games on MAME I want to play that simply do not run well even with my 2.1 GHz CPU overclock settings.

Which games ?
Did you try the option -frameskip 10 or -autoframeskip (frameskip status -> F11, change with -> F9)?

dankcushions

@dodonpachi said in Higher powered Pi 4 alternatives for Retropie:

@george-spiggott So it's possible to have a CPU with a lower clock speed in mhz than a Pi 4, but better MAME performance?

yes, because different CPUs have different instruction sets and 'instructions per clock' (IPC). think of clock speeds like revs of an engine. a v12 is going to do more at 2000rpm than a 50cc motorbike at the same. generally speaking the ARM cpus found in Pis and other SBCs have a lower IPC than x86, so 1MHz of such an ARM processor does less than 1MHz in an x86 processor. even some ancient x86 pentium processors can outperform them.

plus codebases can be optimized better for certain architectures. i expect the bulk of MAME development work is done on x86.

George Spiggott

He just dropped anoher video with a similar spec machine. A lot of these pre gen 8 machines are unable to run Windows 11 so I imagine the price on them is going to continue to fall.

dodonpachi

@george-spiggott I just learned retropie x86 is a thing. Have you tried it before? I think replicating my current Pi 4 build/theme on a beefier x86 device may be just the ticket.

George Spiggott

@dodonpachi no I have a build that looks like Retropie on my X86 PC but it runs from a Windows icon. I had considered starting a thread on here about it but I'm not sure that it is really 'Retropie'.

dodonpachi

@george-spiggott @barbudreadmon What are your thoughts on an Intel NUC5i7RYH, for my purposes? (IE, Mame, CV1000 and 3D fighters like Soul Calibur and Street Fighter EX, etc)

barbudreadmon

@dodonpachi as i said, MAME has a few drcs available when you run it on x86/x86_64 (i can't guarantee they are enabled by default though), so performance will be less likely to be a problem on x86/x86_64, and in the first place if you have a 3+ Ghz cpu performance won't be a problem on those games even without drcs.

George Spiggott

@dodonpachi said in Higher powered Pi 4 alternatives for Retropie:

@george-spiggott @barbudreadmon What are your thoughts on an Intel NUC5i7RYH, for my purposes? (IE, Mame, CV1000 and 3D fighters like Soul Calibur and Street Fighter EX, etc)

If that's in your budget it looks like it will be more than up to the task with an STR of almost 1900.